The Doctor's Daughter
(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna and Martha, 10/5/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Stephen Greenhorn, director: Alice Troughton)
Rank: 145
In an emoji: 👧
'Cooee Doctor! Yes it's me - your great aunty! I've just been genetically created from your DNA by this here machine that's also sent me back through the past to become your ancestor. I've been asked to fight in a war. Well, as if I'm going to do that - you're going to do that for me. As soon as you've put the bins out - smaller on the inside they are. Now put those jelly babies down, they'll rot your teeth. And put that screwdriver of yours to good use and put up some bookshelves for me. Oh and after you've done that go and take my shrivenzale walkies would you? Not to mention cleaning out the Mentor's fishtank. And the Whomobile's in a right state so it is, what have you been driving through? No don't tell me, I don't want to know. As far as I'm concerned young man you're grounded - I've put some wheelclamps on the Tardis too just to be sure you don't run off...No, put down that aunti-matter. Won't you even show mercy to your own...aaagh!'
Does this episode count as...incest? No don’t worry it’s not that kind of a story – this is still ‘Dr Who’ not ‘Dr Oooh’. This is actually quite a normal (by bonkers Dr Who standards) piece about colonists caught in the middle of a war that isn’t what they think it is, probably as close as the modern series has ever come to re-creating the archetype Graham Williams era feel in the 21st century (especially the Tom Bakerish scene where guards are distracted by a clockwork mouse the Doctor just happens to have in his pockets) albeit with a much more satisfactory, plausible ending than a lot of those stories ever had. It’s just that the part of this story that everyone remembers is the genetically-modified being taken from the Doctor’s genetic DNA, christened Jenny for short. And she’s played by...5th Doctor actor Peter Davison’s daughter in real life Georgia Moffett (his real surname if you’re wondering...Peter had to change it to get his equity card because there was already a Peter Moffat working at the BBC. Who also happened to be the director of 5 Dr Who stories between 1981 and 1985 funnily enough). It looks like a publicity coup written to fit round the star (’Peter Davison’s daughter! Whose also the current Doctor’s boyfriend! Roll up roll up and see them fall in love!’) and the publicity machine did go into hyperdrive, dropping hints of a family connection that led to speculation online that Georgia was playing Susan, or Susan’s mother, or (given that Billie Piper keeps turning up on screen every other story this year) that she’s the Doctor’s more conventional child, born after a one-night stand with Rose (well, she is very blonde). But that all came afterwards and wasn’t part of the original plan at all: Georgia, who’d already done a few things for Big Finish despite not having much interest in Dr Who (she was born nine months after ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ when her dad was trying to move on with his career and admits she was too busy ‘playing with dolls’ as a child), simply auditioned along with everyone else without revealing who she really was (and casting directors aren’t always as upon family names and whose who in Who as much as the fanbase). That’s not even the incestuous bit. No, Georgia is better known nowadays as Mrs David Tennant and can herself be seen alongside her hubby in ‘Staged’, series 3 of which showing this very week. And yes, that means the 5th Doctor is his father-in-law in real life. It all looks like a publicity coup: except that’s not how it was at all. David Tennant had only just broken up with Madame De Pompadour (sorry, Sophia Myles who starred in ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’) when he first met Georgia at rehearsals and they fell for each other pretty instantly (they bonded during the cold location shoots when Tennant leant her his deceptively thick coat, which he’s had designed for such cold nights – and, being less thin but more muscly, she ripped it). In retrospect they totally have the hots for each other from the second they meet, that famous big grin getting bigger and those googly eyes widening in every scene they’re in together. On both of them (she really is quite believable as his daughter, give or take the fact that timelords never look their age – Jenny looks not unlike Susan at times too, with the same big eyes). There’s a point at the end of this story, when the Doctor’s cradling Jenny in his arms and kissing her forehead when you think we’re about to get a most inappropriate full-on snog. Which makes this tale of the Doctor being protective for the first off-spring we’ve seen on screen since 1964 a bit, well, off-putting. And that’s what this story has become known for in Dr Who circles, the moment when two of our favourite people in the Whoniverse met and fell in love.
But ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ is primarily about another different sort of relationship, between parent and child and this is a story where a man who thinks he’s the last of his kind is handed a ready-made baby he wasn’t prepared for at all. The story came about when writer Stephen Greenhorn, interviewed by Dr Who Magazine for his last story ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ (and therefore read by everyone in the Who office) was asked about the hardest thing in writing a Dr Who script and he said it was the ‘restrictions’ imposed by the format – that he couldn’t, for instance, give the Doctor a story that changed him too much because things would have to be normal the next week. That is standard practice on most long running dramas (such as police crime drama ‘The Bill’). But that wasn’t how showrunner Russell T Davies thought of the series at all: he wanted his writers to challenge the character’s perception of the world in each and every episode and have what they saw and who they interacted with change them all the time. So, after a lot of teasing (they were friends after all) Davies commissioned Greenhorn to write a mid-series that challenged the Doctor, made him think of things he hadn’t to face before and which took him in a whole new direction we’d never seen. In this story he would get a daughter. Not since Susan back in the first and second seasons have we seen the Doctor in the position of (grand) parental responsibility and it’s not something that comes naturally to a character who most likes to be footloose and fancy free.
It’s one of those sub-plots you get in long-running dramas as an easy way of throwing in big deep emotions, the lone responsibility free character who suddenly discovers they’re a parent without ever realising it, something that happens a lot to single fathers in soap operas (and not as often to single mothers for the obvious reasons that they would notice being pregnant, but there’s a fair few ‘adoption’ stories too). Dr Who had never done that story before because it’s hard to fit a plausible reason to give the Doctor a child without the whole palaver of bringing back Susan and confusing people who don’t remember her. But writer Stephen Greenhorn comes up with a brilliant conceit: a war between two races who have invented their own genetic clone machine - much like the Sontarons the previous week – that takes the Doctor’s own DNA and gives him his own fully grown daughter. Jenny is, by appearances, a fully grown adult as befits a race that need soldiers to be ready to fight from their first hour of life and she’s a chip off the block in so many ways, curious clever and at her happiest when doing lots of running about. However she doesn’t yet have the Doctor’s experience. She’s the first Romana, sort of, someone whose booksmart but not streetsmart and hasn’t yet learnt from everyday life when to follow the rules and when to break therm. At its hearts, too, this is a story about the debate between nature and nurture: Jenny is so like the Doctor in some ways and not at all in others, bred for war and happy to fight, with an innocence the Doctor knows will be crushed if she fights for real. Jenny’s how the Doctor he might have turned out had he not met Ian and Barbara and been shaped by their kindness all those years ago, or the self he might have been if he’d never left Gallifrey. He doesn’t get on with her at all for most of the episode, from what he tells Donna because she’s so unlike him before later admitting that it’s more because she’s too much like him for comfort. He sees this dark side within himself, this need to fight and she remarks on how much he thinks like a soldier – but he doesn’t want to be a soldier, he wants to be a Doctor. Nobody writing this story knew about the 50th special ‘Day Of The Doctor’ yet of course given that it’s still five years away but this is one of those stories that story fits around so well, the Doctor’s guilt over the regeneration that killed so many in the time wars. No wonder the doctor is so horrified at Jenny’s war mongering aspects, because he’s seen that within himself. He desperately doesn’t want that for his daughter – like all good parents he wants better for his child than what he went though himself, but doesn’t know how to do that, how to stop his frustrations with the parts of him he doesn’t like spilling through so that she ends up carrying over the same toxic traits that have held him back. It’s been a while since Dr Who made the most of being one of the few shows families of all ages could sit down and watch together and come away from with a slightly different perspective; this is one of the cleverest, a sort of TV version of Cat Stevens’ ‘father and Son’ in which both parent and daughter are ‘right’ and both are ‘wrong’.
One other issue that’s rather skirted over in this story is how timelords reproduce naturally (mostly because no two Who projects ever seem to agree). The way it’s written on screen the Doctor could be horrified that they’ve taken his DNA to make a soldier – but he could also be horrified at the way it’s done, without permission. There’s a very influential ‘New Adventures’ story, ‘Lungbarrow’ (by Marc ‘Ghostlight’ Platt, who after writing the last recoded TV story also wrote this, the last book with McCoy as the ‘current’ Doctor, before McGann takes over and he 7th Doctor ends up in the ‘past adventures’ series with the first six) that’s all about how timelords are ‘born’, which Russell T at least would have known of, given his time as a fan and his own story ‘damaged Goods’ in this same series, even if he hadn’t read (‘Lungbarrow’ is one of the hardest of all Dr Who books to track down; Chris Chibnall, when asked if he’d ever read it, said even he couldn’t afford to track down a copy). They don’t have a mummy and a daddy, they’re loomed. Because they’re such a long-lived race who think about things in terms of fine balances, timelords only have children when they’re ‘allowed’ to – because the family line is dying out or, more normally, in times of crisis. In this process strands of DNA from two prospective parents are woven together by a machine that, much like the Tardis, is part ‘alive’ and can help choose the timelord that’s ‘needed’ at any one time and sort out which Gallifreyan chapter they belong to, a bit like the Harry Potter ‘sorting hat’ but without the sarcasm (and the book was written before the idea that timelords could change genders, so it’s best not to think about that too much). For the Doctor having a baby turned into a soldier because that’s what a machine ‘needs’ would have caused an almighty flashback which might explain just why he’s so anti Jenny at first, because he doesn’t believe this world needs a soldier. Plus, having babies born out of not a machine’s choice of timelords but out of two beings who love each other is the sort of poetic natural event that would touch the Doctor’s soul as a sort of proto test-tube baby, with reproduction something sacred that shouldn’t be messed around with (it makes sense that a timelord who rejected all the rigid rules of his homeworld would embrace something as messy, odd and random as sexual reproduction). You might think that being manufactured by machine isn’t that different (though the Human future version is a lot quicker) but the big difference between the two is that timelords have part of their memories passed on along with their characteristics and quirks. Only Jenny doesn’t have any of this; she’s a whole new person who has less in common with the Doctor than a newborn timelord would. And given that the Doctor is the ‘last’ timelord, and so can’t ‘loom’ a baby the old-fashioned way, makes the irony all the worse. Note the Doctor’s speech that Jenny is ‘an echo’ while a timelord is a ‘shared history, a shared suffering’. Though its portrayed as an age old the old resenting the young’s innocence while the young resent the old’s experience, the fact is there hasn’t been a timelord that was truly young since the days of Rassilon and Omega in the before-times, every generation carrying a part of their old selves around with them (this is another reason why the ‘Timeless Child’ arc is such a mis-reading of this series. As if we needed any others).
That leads to another brilliant development: generational trauma. The genetically modified soldiers that have been born to this world are automatically given a collective memory of the war, which has been raging for ‘generations’. Each one is primed to fight the war their ancestors started without thinking about it, because it’s such an overwhelming part of their DNA. Everyone is doing what the generation before them did because no one has seen the bigger picture and known when to stop and when someone’s pointing a gun at you it’s natural to point a gun at them back, even if neither of you quote know why you’re doing it. But nobody fighting this war between Hath and Human seems to remember how it started: they’re fighting because that’s what they’ve been programmed to do. It’s a throwback to a debate that’s been running through this series like lettering through sticks of rock ever since the first and second stories, when the Tardis landed in amongst tribes of cavemen fighting for resources and when the Doctor and companions inspired pacifists the Thals that take up arms against the Daleks. It’s very much like the olden days of the 1960s (and Greenhorn is a 1960s baby, born the day before episode five of ‘The Reign Of Terror’ in fact) when as a family show Dr Who was the perfect grounds for debate between children and parents about whether world wars were just and noble or a waste of people and resources. Greenhorn is heavily on the side of the pacifists and comes up with a brilliant plot twist (spoilers): This awful war, in which multiple generations have fought, has only lasted a week. Yes that’s right: this isn’t a seven year war or seven a 700 year war but a seven days war. How can this be? Well, every DNA creation is an adult when they’re born and they only have a short life expectancy, with upwards of twenty generations dying in a single day. No wonder nobody can remember what this war is all about – it started hundreds of generations ago, even though. It’s an excellent comment on the horrors and stupidity of war and David Tennant is at his angry, shouting best when Donna works it all out for him. So that’s two classic twists on an old formula. ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ is shaping up to be a classic.
Only the problem is in the re-writes. Russell T thinks he’s shaping a war epic. The interviews Russell gave in turn about this story to Dr Who Magazine and The Radio Times, about how sometimes even good people are forced to take up a gun, suggests he didn’t really understand this story at all (and that’s not a case of getting his own back on his colleague - genuinely this usually most erudite and intelligent of writers missed what the story was all about). There are a lot of lines in this story that feel like his natural style and not Greenhorn’s at all: the clever one about how all soldiers think they’re trying to stop the war particularly. Which is a problem when they’re in a story that seems to contradict itself. This is part of the downside of how Who is being run in the modern age. It used to be that writers were left to come up with their own storylines and script editors would either agree, make suggestions or nod disapprovingly and try again. At it’s best this formula led to an impressive array of different viewpoints, so that from story to story you could see things from different angles: one week Terry Nation’s seeing war as an inevitable evil and a noble thing if you’re fighting for people you love; the next week Malcolm Hulke’s telling you that all warmongerers are stupid because deep down everyone wants peace. Nowadays, though, 99% of starting points are the showrunners and if a writer doesn’t stay on message they can be re-written until they are until the only voice in the room is the person in charge. That’s not so much of a problem for now because Russell’s been around writer’s rooms long enough to know the power of giving everyone a chance to be heard (though it will get that way when Moffat makes every script ultra-complicated and Chibnall a lecture) but it is in this story. It’s not so much that Davies and Greenhorn disagree so much that they haven’t even realised they have a difference of opinion. Somehow it never came up in any writer’s briefing whether the viewer should side with the Doctor or side with Jenny, whether wars can ever be right and just. Greenhorn wants us to think like Martha, that you can build friendship over racial and societal barriers with kindness and how sometimes it’s worth the risk to trust. Russell thinks the Hath and Jenny dying are collateral damage in a story about war (a point Greenhorn even raises at one point) It is, to carry on the metaphor, as if Malcolm Hulke was asked to re-write one of Terry Nation’s stories with The Thals bating the Daleks through peace and love and a singsong or as if Nation decided to make The Silurians war veterans that wiped humanity out in revenge.
There are lots of big battle sequences here portrayed on screen as if the people fighting are heroes. Plus the switch in tone means that Russell has to re-write a lot of the characters we know and love in order to get the plot to fit. The big revealing moment when the Doctor stops thinking of Jenny as a mutant and as his own daughter comes when she’s just done a load of crazy backflips over some lazers: not the sort of thing the Doctor would normally approve of. I mean, if this was a talent show he’d probably look pleased, but this is a war: physical dexterity through genetic manipulation so Jenny can dodge bullets really shouldn’t be his cup of tea. Had Jenny risked her life to save someone else or thought outside the box to stop a treat shooting at people that’s when he’d accept her as his own. Donna, meanwhile, has gone from being a delightfully thick everywoman (or at least someone who misses the bigger picture) suddenly becomes super-smart, revealing out of nowhere that she’s really good with numbers and working out that the spaceship we’re on is based around the dewy decimal system because she once temped in Chiswick library for six months (news to us: when we first meet her it looks as if Donna has never read anything more taxing than the back of a cereal packet in her life, with the biggest single change in her personality since meeting the Doctor being a curiosity for people and things outside her narrow little world she never would have had without him). Poor Martha, too, gets a rotten sub-plot talking to the Hath who can only make bubbles at her back. She’s a trained medic, the person who walks into a war and works out how to save lives not take them – she’s as pacifist as any of the show’s 21st century companions. But lately the series has been toughening her up, adding her to the Torchwood staff (in a handful of episodes in the middle of series two, transmitted a couple of months before this story) and this story needs her to go along with the idea of a war out of revenge for her Hath friend rather than trying to stop it, which is what the Martha of series 3 would have done. This is a story where everyone is acting so out of character that, rather than just show us the Doctor doing something new, we’re seeing everyone acting differently – often for no good reason. For Russell the big payoff moment of this story is when an enraged Doctor point a gun at General Cobb’s head after shooting his Doctor, apparently dead and for a moment you think he’s going to pull the trigger; for Greenhorn the big payoff moment is when he steps away and declares that ‘I never would’. And you can’t have it both ways; either a story celebrates war or condemns it.
There’s more meddling too from a future showrunner. Steven Moffat was already being groomed to take over from Russell and, partly for that and partly because he and Russell were such good friends, they discussed a lot of episodes in series four. Having Jenny wake up and regenerate at the end was Moffat’s idea, getting up and running off to have new adventures (Russell joked that, given her inexperience and the fact the space shuttle was surrounding a planet filled with so many moons she probably crashed into them straight away – the Big Finish spin-off adventures have Jenny avoiding exactly that fate with a dig at the stereotype of ‘women drivers’). This aversion to death and the cry that ‘everybody lives!’ is something central to Moffat’s time in charge of the show and while when he first did it in ‘The Empty Child’ it was a surprise by now it’s coming as standard. It takes away the whole impact of that final scene when the Doctor, convinced he’s the last of his kind, has to lose another one.
There are other problems too. Messaline is a weird planet: all moons ‘n’ mud. It’s apparently named for the third wife of emperor Claudius (Derek ‘Master’ Jacobi in the TV series), the oversexed one who thought she could get away with sleeping around and ignoring her husband because it was ‘only’ Claudius. I still can’t tell if that’s a clever comment on the fact this is a planet populated not by sexual reproduction but clones or not. As for the Hath this week’s alien race, I’m in a similar quandary. Scientists currently reckon (though I’m sure they’ll change their minds, they often do) that if there is life out there on other planets then odds are its aquatic: from what we understand all life has to start from a natural gloopy soup that’s been hammered by just the right amount of proteins, amino acids and lighting bolts. What is less natural is evolving legs and walking away from the water to live up trees. Dr Who has had its fair share of water-breathing monsters in the past: the fish people (‘The Underwater menace’), Arcturus (‘Curse Of Peladon’), The Mentors (Sil) in ‘Vengeance On Varos’, the vampire fish people (‘Vampires In Venice’). They all have one thing in common: they’re not very portable. Designers are faced with a choice between keeping tem in bodies of water or giving them a portable tank to drag around with them. The Hath look as if they’ve got round the problem: a tank that slots onto the bottom of their fish-heads and bows bubbles. Only of course that means we have another problem: they can’t talk, or at least not so we can hear them (apparently the Tardis translator circuits doesn’t ‘do’ bubbles). And just as with other monsters in Dr Who that don’t talk (giant insects mostly) we never get to learn their back story or hear their half of events. Which is a particular problem in a story that desperately needs to stay neutral, so that we don’t side with the Humans or Haths over the other. Which is a shame because the design is one of the most impressive costumes seen in the series – the Hath’s eyes, especially, look very real and they say more with them than a lot of races do with words. It’s just a shame we couldn’t have had the words to go with them, or at least a scene where the Doctor stumbled across a Hath locker room and reads a diary about their life pre-war. Hell hath no fury like a Hath scorned and they’re a believable match for the Humans, despite not having time to be given much, in fact, any of a back story as to why they’re in this war and looking a bit puny and rather cute (I’m amazed there wasn’t a soft toy version like there was of practically everything else in this era – especially one that blows real bubbles; I so want one if the Dr Who merchandise team is reading).
It goes beyond the monsters though. I don’t often talk about plotholes in these reviews because writing fiction is hard work: you’re never going to get a story where all the elements completely match up not just with each other but every episode of a long-running series in every way. But there are a lot of plotholes in this story. The big scene with the lazers: who built that exactly? When this ship was designed the Humans and Hath were working together, there was no need to guide the shuttle controls from anyone. Why do the Hath capture Martha (and treat her like a pet dog in one truly bizarre scene) rather than shoot her the way they apparently have with every other Human? They don’t know she’s a medic who wants to save them and their change of heart comes after they’ve taken her prisoner and she saves Peck. If they wanted to capture a human they’ve had, what, 600 generations of chances before now. Why does Jenny take so long to ‘regenerate’? And if it’s a side effect of being a timelord, why doesn’t she change her appearance when she does? (In the script its more obvious that it’s a side effect of the gas in the biosphere, but that’s even sillier – in that case everyone should be waking up and living their lives all over again). If the humans are so desperate for soldiers (and they are) then why aren’t his companions pushed into the genetic anomaly machine too? There should be lots of little Marthas running around, torn between trying to hurt people and patch them up and lots of little Donnas shooting at Hath and going ‘oi, watch it fish freaks!’ All of them should be naked, or if the genetic mutation machine can somehow give everyone clothes then they should all be wearing the same uniforms, including Jenny. Unless it somehow ‘borrows’ from the original person cloned, in which case she should be dressed exactly like a mini-Doctor (with a trenchcoat three sizes too big that falls off her when jumping lazers). Plus Jenny isn’t technically the Doctor’s daughter at all, even though everyone refers to her as that: there’s no second DNA input so technically she’s his much younger identical twin, with the same genes but jumbled in a different order (given the lack of females in the human army and what we now know about timelord biology she seems to have been made female at random but could just as easily have been male; the timelords, taken from the ‘same’ DNA, think of each other as sort of cousins in ‘Lungbarrow’ – which raises other implications for The Doctor and Master’s relationship if they’re really made from the same DNA re-arranged. Was that really ‘would you do this to your own…loom family?’ how that sentence in ‘Planet Of Fire’ was actually going to end?)
People change their minds willy nilly in this story without any reasons for it too: at first Donna is as anti-Jenny as the Doctor is (‘Watch it, GI Jane!’) , softening her approach because why exactly? Because she sees how annoyed the Doctor is about it all? (well, so was she a few scenes ago). The Doctor and Donna have switched personality traits all round this story: he’s the emotional shouty one and she’s the calm level-headed one (for all that Greenhorn was handed this story about having the Doctor ‘changed’ Russell seems to have missed how Donna has been so rewritten; she’s more like her old self than ever in next adventure ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ and she’ back to being the toddler again not the wise old owl). In other characters that would feel like a betrayal but there’s long been a hint that there was more depth to donna and it’s good to get that here before the season finale whallops that home – however this isn’t a character arc so much as a zigzag. Donna also, out of nowhere, offers to distract the guards with her ‘womanly wiles’ and the Doctor looks horrified: a funny moment to be sure but it’s so out of character for Donna. It’s as if Greenhorn is still writing the for the seemingly confident shouty Donna he saw in ‘The Runaway Bride’ and went out for tea at the end when it turned out that it was all just bluster and a cover up for her insecurities. The Donna we’ve come to know the past five stories would no more start flirting with someone than, say K9 would. Martha maybe. If she thought the Doctor was watching and jealous. Why not five that plot to her? In fact why not switch the Donna and Martha storyline around or even put them together while the Doctor and Jenny become a pair: Donna’s a natural empathy good at sympathising with strange looking life-forms, it’s actually more in character to befriend one than Martha (though in keeping for Martha to want to save a life). Martha’s having a great old time, bounding out the Tardis with more excitement than she ever had in series 3, but one bad incident with a Hath she barely knew and she’s begging to go home without ever quite explaining why (she’s seen worse just at Torchwood lately; it would make sense if this was Rose, but Martha’s had a tough old time in Who and last year ended with The Master torturing her family; is a dead fish, a casualty of war, really enough to change her mind?) Someone seems to have made Cob general on the human side. But presumably he’s no older than everyone else (he’s certainly less than a week old if he doesn’t know the origins of the war). Who gave him promotion? Plus the big one of course: how come the Hath, who can’t breathe oxygen, are on board this spaceship at all? And why haven’t they tried to, say, flood the ship or at least turn on the sprinkler system to make the odds better for them than the humans? And how come one drowns when it still has a breathing device attached to it’s gills? (they notice this too late for broadcast and ad a sound of smashing glass for the DVD, blu-ray and i-player versions, but if you look you can see the glass is intact). A couple of anomalies I can live with (like the Doctor I'm a very anomolous reviewer) but there’s so much patchwork going on to make this story work it makes you wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off starting again.
Because there is a great story in here somewhere. You see, this story does the sort of thing Dr Who always used to (factions fighting, even though neither of them can quite remember why – this is a cold war story, for the first time since maybe ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’, or ‘Curse Of Fenric’ if you see it as a Russian story rather than a Viking one), only it’s with a couple of really clever twists and all the bigger budget that Dr Who now has. act. Interesting to see updated version of storyline that used to be who’s bread and butter. Honestly it’s not that different to, say, ‘Warriors On The Cheap’ or ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ in plot terms, with two equal foes in total stalemate, even though wars really weren’t like this in the 21st century. Post 9/11 we’re much more likely to get wars caused through sudden sneaky attacks or big conspiracies or fights over resources – it’s good to have a tale that’s traditional in so many ways. The idea that both sides have a claim to the territory so the fighting seems utterly ridiculous to us – until we think about how our own petty wars must look to aliens(or our children, when we try to explain all this to them, or at any rate it did before Putin started getting bloodthirsty and empirical all over again). These are two sides who’ve grown apart through a misunderstanding and a mis-communication, which is mirrored nicely by the sub-plot between the Doctor and Jenny, with a plot that tries to find common ground in both big and little ways. Though we never find out the backstory this setting feels at one with ‘The Ark’ and ‘The Ark In Space’ both, humanity’s last stragglers trying to forge out a new life in the stars because of some unforeseen tragedy. I don’t know about the Hath’s background but how typical that mankind’s last days should see them still fighting another war that puts them all in danger. The location filming in Swansea’s Planetaria, the space-age looking half-museum, half-funfair collection of planet specimens that’s a sort of real life ‘Space Museum’ crossed with ‘The Ark’ with lots of special effect and pizzazz, is the perfect choice and they make the most of it, all that lush foliage and life at the heart of a spaceship, one that’s meant to be saving both species not letting them kill each other off. Yes there’s an awful lot of running down corridors in this story, even for Who, but they’re beautiful corridors. It all looks magnificent with set and costume designers and director all on the page even if the writers aren’t. It looks, with the sound down, like a big Hollywood film in fact (perhaps that’s why, an in-joke, the Human boss is called ‘Gable’ as in ‘Clark’ and the Hath ‘Peck’ as in ‘Gregory’, although that last one might just be because he has a beak).
Jenny is a great character. She’s
just enough like the Doctor to be believable as his child but a whole new
independent soul with a mind of her own. She defies his authority the same way the
Doctor is always defying authority himself. You can totally see her point of view
alongside the Doctor’s and she’s every bit as sarky and charismatic and full of
life as he is, Georgia Moffett nailing the character. You feel as if you know
her really well by the end of this story, more than full companions from the
Chibnall era we’ve followed for three years, despite only having about half an
hour of screentime (possibly the upside of having Russell as showrunner: not
that Greenhorn can’t write fully fledges characters either but this is a
particular gift of The Davies overseeing your work). We don’t get a lot of time getting to know Jenny but what we do
is time well spent – she shares all the Doctor’s traits of heroism and justice,
just not his love for peace (that’s what comes up of growing up in a
warzone: you think like a soldier) and the conflict that builds up with
the Doctor makes for some of the episode’s best moments. We haven’t seen
the Doctor try to be a responsible parent since he was William Hartnell and a
junior being himself by timelord standards and, well, responsibility is
something he’d been trying to duck out of since day one. It’s Donna,
though, who shines most in this story, soothing the familial rows (so
like her own warring family – you sense that she’s longed for an
outsider to do this for the endless battles between her and her mum).
The cheeky
dialogue throughout, too is, is smart, taking the sort of banter and debate about
unwanted relationships and responsibilities you get in soaps but gives it a
whole other dimension of timey wimey and sciency wiency. ‘They stole a tissue
sample at gunpoint and processed it – it’s not what you call natural parenting’
snaps the Doctor to Donna when she wonders why he isn’t relating to his child. ‘You
can’t extrapolate a relationship from a biological accident’ says the Doctor. ‘Child
support agency can’ laughs Donna. ‘When you look up genocide in the dictionary
you’ll see a picture of me and it will read ‘not over my dead body’ huffs the
last of the timelords to general Cobb. ‘What are you going to do? Tell my dad?’
asks Jenny as she runs off at the end. If the alternative to fighting is
talking then there’s a lot of it in ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ and almost all of
it is good (another reason why it’s so frustrating the Hath don’t get to talk).
Although the best scene of all might be the one where Donna suddenly (and again
very out of character for her) emotionally manipulates The Doctor by making him
listen to Jenny’s joint heartbeat. Not a word about The Doctor’s changes of heart(s)
is spoken: David Tennant acts it all with his eyes. Poor Martha, by contrast; it’s a waste of
Freema Agyeman’s talents to be honest as she doesn’t get to do much except
blow pretend bubbles in a jokey attempt at communication and sob, neither of
which are her strengths. As for the other characters in this story we don’t
really get to know any and don’t really care about anyone directly affected by
this war except Jenny, so a lot of this story leaves you feeling ‘so what?’ The
result is a curious hodgepodge: there are parts of this story that are utterly
brilliant (given the Doctor a daughter, having her played by Georgia Moffett
and the plot twist of how long the war’s been running) but there are other
things that just don’t work at all (the war, the Hath, the several million
plotholes). The result is a story that’s both easy to love and easy to mock all
at the same time, a test-tube baby that ends up having more flaws than most
stories despite wrapped around two of the best strands of sub-plot DNA in the
whole of the modern series.
POSITIVES + As maddening as Jenny’s regeneration might be, the very end is perfect: she runs off, having stolen a spaceshuttle, in just the way her dad stole his Tardis, leaving to explore the universe. Considering it’s a last minute change to the plot it’s remarkably apt.
NEGATIVES - The much-mocked scene where the just-born half-human half-timelord Jenny suddenly has the ability to leap through lasers, Mission Impossible style, without setting any of them off. It’s never explained where this ability has come from or why – I mean, if the soldiers could all do it they’d have beaten the Hath yonks ago, if it was a timelord thing the Doctor would have done it heaps of times (there’d be no stopping the Doctor-Romana team on their quest for the ‘Key To Time’ for starters) and if it’s a human thing...Well, why can’t I do that? It looks fun.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Call me old fashioned, but if you really wanted peace couldn't you just stop fighting?’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There have, to date, been two box sets of audio adventures from Big Finish featuring Jenny (2018 and 2021), each one containing four stories. Picking up where ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ left off, they feature Jenny trying to learn how to pilot the starship she stole and getting into trouble (the ‘having trouble with transport’ gene seems to be strong!) Georgia Moffett is excellent, handling Jenny’s quick switches between remorse, feistiness and humour with aplomb, but the rest of the cast can’t match her with some of the dodgiest accents heard since Morton Dill and the stories aren’t as strong as they might be. Jenny meets many monsters from the Whoniverse but as yet no Doctors (not even her real-life hubby), the best story being ‘Prisoner Of The Ood’ where they’re working as slaves in 21st century Earth (where Jenny gets to be as outraged as her old man, although it all turns out to be a ruse). The weirdest story: ‘Neon Reign’ which sounds like a book even the New Adventures line would have rejected, about a planet ruled by a sexist dragon King who thinks females are all slaves in a story that’s a bit too ‘Star Trek’ for a Who spin-off. Along the way she meets Dorium Maldovar (the blue-faced guy from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’), gains a ‘companion’ in Noah and an enemy in a cyborg bounty hunter trying to track her down, while many plots play upon her gullibility as a bright but inexperienced ‘new born’ in an adult body, similar to the first Romana. Where the parent story was all a bit fast though, the stories are a tad on the slow side and lack the plot or characters enough to sustain each hour long story.
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